On Saturday, I took my camera to Campbell's Cove to shoot a free performance on the harbour called "Fire Water," a cross-cultural combination of Aboriginal smoke ceremony and Bollywood-inspired dance interpreting the wreck of the Sydney Cove. In 1797, the merchant ship sailed from Calcutta and sank off the coast of Tasmania. The performance culminated with the arrival in the cove of a ghostly tall ship so fully rigged with ethereal blue and magenta lights as to seem constructed of light itself.
Festivities continued around the corner in The Rocks, the old historical part of Sydney, with the open-air night markets. Beneath the undulating tent peaks I strolled between stalls selling smooth wooden bowls of redgum and coolibah, hip fashion and jewellery from Paris, tapered candles in pinks and oranges, framed photographs and rich-smelling specialty chocolates. At the end of the stalls, a flamenco performance broke out.A troupe from the local dance school El Duende Flamenco, led by a handsome Chinese woman in a fuschia frock and overseen by a Spanish matron, tapped, clapped and twirled to live flamenco guitar. Half a dozen women in full-length frilled dresses with fans and castanets spun, flickered and clacked. A man in a round, broad-rimmed hat and cumberbund clicked his heels, and a little girl of nine or ten stole the show when she fanned her dress and pleated her fan in a flamboyant solo.
The explosion of colours in the dresses and the lights were a photographer's candy store. Check out some of my shots.
